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This will make you smarter, new scientific concepts to improve your thinking, edited by John Brockman ; foreword by David Brooks

eng

illustrations

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non fiction

This will make you smarter

733224087

edited by John Brockman ; foreword by David Brooks

new scientific concepts to improve your thinking

This Will Make You Smarter presents brilliant but accessible ideas to expand every mind. What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world's most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world

Foreword / David Brooks -- Preface / John Brockman -- "Deep Time" and the Far Future / Martin Rees -- We Are Unique / Marcelo Gleiser -- The Mediocrity Principle / P.Z. Myers -- The Pointless Universe / Sean Carroll -- The Copernican Principle / Samuel Arbesman -- We Are Not Alone in the Universe / J. Craig Venter -- Microbes Run the World / Stewart Brand -- The Double-Blind Control Experiment / Richard Dawkins -- Promoting a Scientific Lifestyle / Max Tegmark -- Experimentation / Roger Schank -- The Controlled Experiment / Timo Hannay -- Gedankenexperiment / Gino Segre -- The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science / Kathryn Schulz -- Each of Us Is Ordinary, Yet One of a Kind / Samuel Barondes -- Nexus Causality, Moral Warfare, and Misattribution Arbitrage / John Tooby -- Self-Serving Bias / David G. Myers -- Cognitive Humility / Gary Marcus -- Technologies Have Biases / Douglas Rushkoff -- Bias Is the Nose for the Story / Gerald Smallberg -- Control Your Spotlight / Jonah Lehrer -- The Focusing Illusion / Daniel Kahneman -- The Uselessness of Certainty / Carlo Rovelli -- Uncertainty / Lawrence Krauss -- A Sense of Proportion About Fear of the Unknown / Aubrey De Grey -- Because / Nigel Goldenfeld -- The Name Game / Stuart Firestein -- Living Is Fatal / Seth Lloyd -- Uncalculated Risk / Garrett Lisi -- Truth Is a Model / Neil GershenfeldE Pluribus Unum / Jon Kleinberg -- A Proxemics of Urban Sexuality / Stefano Boeri -- Failure Liberates Success / Kevin Kelly -- Holism / Nicholas A. Christakis -- Tanstaafl / Robert R. Provine -- Skeptical Empiricism / Gerald Holton -- Open Systems / Thomas A. Bass -- Non-Inherent Inheritance / George Church -- Shifting Baseline Syndrome / Paul Kedrosky -- Perma / Martin Seligman -- Positive-Sum Games / Steven Pinker -- The Snuggle for Existence / Roger Highfield -- The Law of Comparative Advantage / Dylan Evans -- Structured Serendipity / Jason Zweig -- The World Is Unpredictable / Rudy Rucker -- Randomness / Charles Seife -- The Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine / Clifford Pickover -- Inference to the Best Explanation / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein -- Pragmamorphism / Emanuel Derman -- Cognitive Load / Nicholas Carr -- To Curate / Hans Ulrich Obrist -- "Graceful" SHAs / Richard Nisbett -- Externalities / Rob Kurzban -- Everything Is in Motion / James O'Donnell -- Subselves and the Modular Mind / Douglas T. Kenrick -- Predictive Coding / Andy Clark -- Our Sensory Desktop / Donald Hoffman -- The Senses and the Multisensory / Barry C. Smith -- The Umwelt / David Eagleman -- The Rational Unconscious / Alison Gopnik -- We Are Blind to Much That Shapes Our Mental Life / Adam AlterAn Instinct to Learn / W. Tecumseh Fitch -- Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down / Michael Shermer -- Fixed-Action Patterns / Irene Pepperberg -- Powers of 10 / Terrence Sejnowski -- Life Code / Juan Enriquez -- Constraint Satisfaction / Stephen M. Kosslyn -- Cycles / Daniel C. Dennett -- Keystone Consumers / Jennifer Jacquet -- Cumulative Error / Jaron Lanier -- Cultural Attractors / Dan Sperber -- Scale Analysis / Giulio Boccaletti -- Hidden Layers / Frank Wilczek -- "Science" / Lisa Randall -- The Expanding In-Group / Marcel Kinsbourne -- Contingent Superorganisms / Jonathan Haidt -- The Pareto Principle / Clay Shirky -- Find That Frame / William Calvin -- Wicked Problems / Jay Rosen -- Anthropocene Thinking / Daniel Goleman -- Homo dilatus / Alun Anderson -- We Are Lost in Thought / Sam Harris -- The Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model / Thomas Metzinger -- Correlation Is Not a Cause / Sue Blackmore -- Information Flow / David Dalrymple -- Thinking in Time Versus Thinking Outside of Time / Lee Smolin -- Negative Capability Is a Profound Therapy / Richard Foreman -- Depth / Tor Nørretranders -- Temperament Dimensions / Helen Fisher -- The Personality/Insanity Continuum / Geoffrey Miller -- Arise / Joel Gold -- Systemic Equilibrium / Matthew RitchieProjective Thinking / Linda Stone -- Anomalies and Paradigms / V.S. Ramachandran -- Recursive Structure / David Gelernter -- Designing Your Mind / Don Tapscott -- Free Jazz / Andrian Kreye -- Collective Intelligence / Matt Ridley -- Risk Literacy / Gerd Gigerenzer -- Science Versus Theater / Ross Anderson -- The Base Rate / Keith Devlin -- Findex / Marti Hearst -- An Assertion Is Often an Empirical Question, Settled by Collecting Evidence / Susan Fiske -- Scientists Should Be Scientists / Gregory Paul -- Bricoleur / James Croak -- Science's Methods Aren't Just for Science / Mark Henderson -- The Game of Life -- and Looking for Generators / Nick Bostrom -- Anecdotalism / Robert Sapolsky -- You Can Show That Something Is Definitely Dangerous but Not That It's Definitely Safe / Tom Standage -- Absence and Evidence / Christine Finn -- Path Dependence / John McWhorter -- Interbeing / Scott D. Sampson -- The Other / Dimitar Sasselov -- Ecology / Brian Eno -- Dualities / Stephon H. Alexander -- Dualities / Amanda Gefter -- The Paradox / Anthony Aguirre -- Hunting for Root Cause: The Human "Black Box" / Eric Topol -- Personal Data Mining / David Rowan -- Parallelism in Art and Commerce / Satyajit Das -- Innovation / Laurence C. Smith -- The Gibbs Landscape / Kevin Hand -- Black Swan Technologies / Vinod KhoslaKakonomics / Gloria Origgi -- Kayfabe / Eric Weinstein -- Einstein's Blade in Ockham's Razor / Kai Krause -- Heat-Seeking Missiles / Dave Winer -- Entanglement / Marco Iacoboni -- Technology Paved the Way for Humanity / Timothy Taylor -- Time Span of Discretion / Paul Saffo -- Defeasibility / Tania Lombrozo -- Aether / Richard Thaler -- Knowledge as a Hypothesis / Mark Pagel -- The Einstellung Effect / Evgeny Morozov -- Homo sensus sapiens: The Animal That Feels and Reasons / Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran -- Understanding Confabulation / Fiery Cushman -- Sexual Selection / David M. Buss -- QED Moments / Bart Kosko -- Objects of Understanding and Communication / Richard Saul Wurman -- Life as a Side Effect / Carl Zimmer -- The Veeck Effect / Gregory Cochran -- Supervenience! / Joshua Greene -- The Culture Cycle / Hazel Rose Markus / Alana Conner -- Phase Transitions and Scale Transitions / Victoria Stodden -- Replicability / Brian Knutson -- Ambient Memory and the Myth of Neutral Observation / Xeni Jardin -- A Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process / Diane F. Halpern -- The Dece(i)bo Effect / Beatrice Golomb -- Anthropophilia / Andrew Revkin -- A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory / Mahzarin R. Banaji -- Everyday Apophenia / David Pizarro -- A Cognitive Toolkit Full of Garbage / Ernst Poppel -- Acknowledgments -- Index